Dozens of people streamed into the central square of a Ukrainian city to place candles on a large radiation hazard symbol to commemorate those killed in the Chernobyl disaster 40 years ago.
Residents of Slavutych show up for the vigil each year despite current wartime curfews in Ukraine. This year, they donned hazmat suits.
People of all ages gathered in the square, some arriving as families carrying spring tulips and daffodils.
They lined up in a broad plaza framed by Soviet-era apartment blocks, where a memorial stands near a row of posters honouring residents killed in the Russia-Ukraine war.
The April 26, 1986, disaster shone a spotlight on lax safety standards and government secrecy in what was then the Soviet Union.
The explosion was not reported by Soviet authorities for two days, only after winds had carried the fallout across Europe and Swedish experts had gone public with their concerns.
Sign up for all of the latest stories
Start your day informed with Metro’s News Updates newsletter or get Breaking News alerts the moment it happens.
About 600,000 people, often referred to as Chornobyl’s ‘liquidators’, were sent in to fight the fire at the nuclear plant and clean up the worst of its contamination.
People dressed in white protective suits and face masks, symbolising the liquidators, stood in silence holding candles.
Thirty workers died within months from either the explosion or acute radiation sickness. The accident exposed millions in the region to dangerous levels of radiation and forced a wide-scale, permanent evacuation of hundreds of towns and villages in Ukraine and Belarus.
Slavutych, around 32 miles from the former plant, dates to this period. While most evacuees were resettled across nearby districts in the Kyiv region, in late 1986, Soviet authorities began building what would become the city to house workers from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and their families. The first residents moved in around 1988.
Larysa Panova, 67, regularly travelled back to her hometown of Chernobyl to visit family before Russia’s full-scale invasion. But with the war, access to the exclusion zone became restricted.
‘I never stop thinking of Chernobyl as my homeland. You remember your school, your childhood, your youth – everything happened there, in Chernobyl,’ she said.
As music played at the memorial, a woman said: ‘Years pass, generations change, but the pain of Chernobyl does not fade.’
Since the war began, the city has endured a brief Russian occupation during Moscow’s failed push to seize the Ukrainian capital in the early days of the war, as well as harsh winters – especially the last one, when blackouts forced some residents to cook meals over open fires in the streets.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.